Intermediary roles in regulatory programs: Toward a role-based framework

This paper develops a role-based framework of intermediaries in regulatory programs. In examining the types of roles that organizations adopt in regulation and governance, we argue that roles have important implications for understanding organizational and program level dynamism and outcomes. We use the Regulator-Intermediary-rule-Taker framework to describe how organizational roles can be adopted through assignment, appropriation, or promotion. We then go deeper into how intermediaries adopt a variety of different roles in key regulatory programs. We examine generic intermediary roles across programs that involve four main groups of activities: creating and/or organizing, coordinating between programs, supporting implementation, and voicing an opinion. All in all, our role-based framework allows for a novel relational way to understand interorganizational and institutional dynamism in complex, interactive, and ever-changing regulatory regimes.